Running WebORB for Java in Google App Engine

Google has recently added support for Java applications to the Google App Engine, which is their cloud environment for running web-based applications. We decided to try out WebORB for Java and ran into a few problems. Most of the problems were related to the usage of the classes which are not on the approved JRE Class White List. There is also a bug related to their Servlet API specification that prevented normal execution of WebORB. However, we found a way to work around all the major issues and I am happy to report that WebORB for Java now can be deployed into Google App Engine to provide connectivity for Flex, Flash, Silverlight and AJAX clients with the deployed Java objects. 

We also have a sample WebORB deployment in our AppEngine account which you can see at the following URL (check out the Examples tab as well as the Service Browser under management):

http://weborbdemo.appspot.com/

We're working on a new build of the product with all the fixes we have made. Until then, there is a patch build of WebORB for Google App Engine available for download.

The ZIP file contains both management console and examples. However, if you do not care about that, then use just the contents of the WEB-INF folder and extract the files into the WEB-INF directory of your Google App Engine application.

We also plan to make a few changes in the product to support Google's persistence mechanism. Once it is done, then all the features that require File IO (code generation, data management, etc) will also be supported.

Happy coding!